


Brown Eyed Girls

by Kelly123



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fatherhood, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Gen, One Shot, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kelly123/pseuds/Kelly123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He cannot let the girl cry. </p><p>Not now, not ever again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brown Eyed Girls

**Author's Note:**

> So this...I don't even know. It's been sitting in the notes app of my iPhone for months now, and I just couldn't get it to flow like I wanted. I can't tell you the number of times I have copy and pasted the paragraphs around, trying to make sense of it all. And what you've got here is as good as it's going to get.
> 
> No beta here, so forgive...well, just forgive me in general? Appreciate ya!

They all say he should let the girl cry.

He finds it strange that he should have to be told as much. Even more strange that he tries to listen.

Before had been a lifetime ago, no matter the years. Before, he had been a man who paid no heed to anyone else, much less their tears or their talk. He needed not to be told to ignore weeping, not when he was one to leave so many to it. As it were, on most occasions he had been the cause of their tears himself, and it never brought him a moment's pause. The weakness of the fairer sex had been something he had laughed at, walked away from, scoffed and boasted of when he returned from his exploits with a swagger to his step. 

But he is not that man any longer, if he even is a man at all. Now, he cannot ignore the sound. 

Tears have a different meaning to him than they once did, a deeper one, tinged with blood and screams and memories which slip through the channels left behind on his skin to wind their way around his neck and leave him gasping for breath. Cries call up demonic eyes filled with glee and big brown ones filled with tears, and his own burning so desperately as they longed to close, and pain, pain, pain.

She does not cry in pain, but the sound is similar enough to make his own flesh hurt in memory.

They tease him for it, these common folk in the small village they have made a home in, but fail to see his fear as anything more than that of a new father. Old women shake their fingers and chastise him, saying that if he would only stay away from her cradle, if he could stop himself from lifting her the moment she begins to fuss, that the tiny thing will surely tire herself out and fall fast to sleep. She's going to end up a right spoiled little wench, if he keeps coddling her like he does, and children are hard to raise enough without a swollen head resting atop their shoulders.

They say it with a laugh and a clap on his shoulder, and the child giggles as they pull faces at her down in his arms. Jeyne comes to him once they've gone, to kiss the wrinkles from his brow and do the same to the chubby cheeks between them. She says they speak true, with all the confidence of the mother which she could never truly be, and lifts the child to take it to bed. She trusts them, as she surely as she has trusted him, and the notion makes him uneasy. 

For they also call him Theon instead of Reek and Jeyne his wife instead of Ramsay's, and they call the child his daughter instead of an orphan.

He cannot stop but to think of all they don't know, what they can't know and won't ever, and he must fight the urge to forget his name once more. 

It will not be, though, not when he can finally hear the sound of it on their lips, on her lips, without cowering. Jeyne had helped as best she knew how, had washed him and held his mangled hands within her own, even pressed her lips against his in a whisper of breath too short and light to be called a kiss, but it hadn't been enough. At least then, it hadn't been, not yet. Still his jaw had remained locked and his eyes open, watchful for sudden movement or hands which held sharp objects to punish him for taking what wasn't his. In their stead, he has found tiny fingers, pink and plump, which wrap around his own as her tears soften to whimpers at his touch.

They had found her by her cries. 

A child alone in the ruins of a charred village, echoing the sobs Jeyne had gasped into his skin at night when her nightmares took her. The sounds resonated in his bones, crashing in from all around him when his own lips could not find the words to form the terror which remained locked away inside of him. It chilled him colder than the icy winter winds which they struggled against at night, and everything within him wanted to run from it. He had fought against bringing her with them, for wherever it was that they were bound, the journey was difficult at best with only the two of them, a third would be most certainly impossible. She was almost old enough to walk, and they could not manage another mouth to feed when they could barely keep meat on their own bones.

But her cries had been like Jeyne's, and her brown eyes full of tears had been like Jeyne's, and with both of them directed at him he had been powerless to resist. The matter had been decided when something deep inside of him lurched inexplicably after Jeyne placed the squalling thing in his weak and trembling arms and miraculously, she had quieted.

He had been aghast as the thing stopped her tears, but Jeyne had only smiled. She had murmured that he had done the same for her so many times over, how could be expect any less, and his tongue had dried and stuck to the roof of his mouth. Wordlessly, he had nodded his assent, and when they found a village to call home, he suddenly found himself a husband...and a father.

He struggles to call up memories from lifetimes ago, of the sound of baby Arya's cries, or Bran's or Rickon's, but fails to remember anything of the sort. He had not concerned himself with such womanly pursuits as children and weeping when he was that man, leaving them for Old Nan and Robb to fuss over. 

He had teased Robb for it, for coming to the training yards with a toddling Arya on his hip. He remembers that, remembers the burn of jealousy as his friend doted on the ugly little girl who demanded to be lifted up in the armory so that she might see the weapons her mother wouldn't let her hold. He wonders if he was ever the one to hold her, and he thinks not. For it is strange and entirely new, the weight of this child the first time Jeyne placed her in his arms, and more than a little terrifying. Even more frightening, though, is the emptiness he feels when he lets go.

So he doesn't, he just presses her more closely to him, close to his heart along with his doubts and his fears and his secrets, safe against his chest.

His thin, hideous scared chest, another thing they know naught of. One that hides a heart he fears bears even more signs of tortures he cannot ever forget. One which pounds so frantically within him he wonders that is does not stir her screams even more. But it doesn't, if anything, the rhythm soothes her, a strange lullaby he never thought to be one to give.

It has come so easily to Jeyne, the balancing of a babe on her hip while she boils water, or bathing of a body so tiny he fears it will break in his hands, that he knows she was destined to be a mother. Knows in the way her nightmares have become less and less, replaced by dreamy smiles as she lets herself folds against him in the night like she is no longer afraid of being caught. She greets him at the door like a true wife, demands a kiss on her cheek as well as one for the babe which she is trying to teach to call him Papa.

Another new name, and it scares him mayhaps more than the others.

He does not yet know if he is fit to be a father. But he knows that the child has calmed Jeyne's tears, and by some wonder he can calm the child's, and so he wonders if this is atonement for what he failed for so long to give her. Sometimes he thinks, for the madness of a moment or two, of Jeyne swollen and round with another babe, his child, while the little girl grows tall beside her. A child with ten fingers and ten toes, who will never know what it means to hurt like the rest of them have. But it is only a happy notion for a heartbeat or two, and then he thinks of the screams of childbirth, of Jeyne crying out in pain, pain, pain, like before, and he is almost glad that he cannot give her a child. 

But she only sighs against him, slipping her arms around his shoulders in an embrace which which have once sent him scrambling away, and tells him that he already has. 

And so he lies in their narrow bed wide awake and fidgets with the loose ends of his clothing with what remains of his fingers. Trying not to disturb her as she lies so still next to him, he grinds his new teeth until the muscles of his jaw ache, and he tries to push the sound of the child's woeful cries away from him. 

But it is all for naught, for he does not think he can stand any more tears. He cannot let the child cry, if there is anything in his power to calm her, and he won't, can't, sit idly by ever again, no matter what the rest might say. He hears their teasing ring in his ears as he launches to unsteady feet even though the room is dark and empty. 

If he must hold her until sunlight replaces the night, then he will. 

The child smiles when he peers over the edge of her cradle, dark eyes glossy with tears and yet bright in the darkness of night at the same time. He chuckles as he bends to lift her, hopeless to refuse the outstretched arms which reach for him. 

Jeyne laughs too, a sleepy sound as she stands, awake despite his efforts to remain quiet. She sleeps lightly now, as they both do, partially from an ingrained fear they perhaps will never shake, and partially for the babe. Jeyne had been the one to hold her in the night at first, when he was still too unsure his shaking arms would support her, but now he is almost always the first at the cradle. She slips behind him, her forehead pressed against his shoulder blade as they stand before the open window, and he does not jolt from the feeling of another so close to him, not now, not when it's her. He knows Jeyne, knows her name and the smell of her soft, clean skin. Knows the feel of her body, bare and boney, as it slips against his underneath threadbare blankets, and the sounds of the beautiful, breathy gasps he can pull from her lips. Knows he loves her, or at least as close to it as he is able.

The night breeze comes in gently, threading through darker hair that has only begun to grow back with its former color, and Jeyne shivers a bit at the chill. She nuzzles at his tunic with what remains of her nose and asks him to come back to bed, same as she does every night when she finds him holding the child by the light of the moon. But her touch is welcome, and her tone is sweet, and he knows she doesn't think him soft like the others are like to. 

He doesn't answer, only continues rocking the tightly-wrapped bundle which lies cocooned in his arms. The girl mewls at the sound of Jeyne's voice, and wrinkles her tiny nose as it peaks from the edge of her blankets. She looks hopelessly delicate, something which he never had time for in years past, and he can't help but to stare in wonder. He thinks to himself if all babes are as beautiful as this one, but some memory dredges itself back into his mind, of one of the Stark children, red and scowling, before the image flickers at the periphery of his conscious and is gone. It is surely for the best, to forget what was so that all he can see is fair skin illuminated in the moonlight, and all he can hear is the soft breathing of the two people he cares most for, and all he feels is...not safe, never safe, but something nearer to the emotion than he thought might ever be possible.

Her lids are closed, and he can tell she is but one breath away from sleep. They flutter at him one last time as he lowers her back into her own miniature furs, eyes big and brown and so much like Jeyne's that he can almost believe they share the same blood.

They don't, of course. Jeyne is ruined and Theon is ruined and the babe is too perfect to have come from either one of their wrecked bodies.

But they lie, and sometimes even he forgets she is not truly his own. But it is enough, he supposes, for he is hers, as true as true can be.


End file.
